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Is Guitar Hero a Cloud? The Cloud Wars
By John | July 7, 2008
The Cloud Wars
I was reading a recent post about the Merrill Lynch’s research note titled “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake” and it started me thinking about the cloud vs. IT infrastructure question again. As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the list of who is a cloud just keeps getting longer and longer. I originally thought the Forrester 11 list was a little to long when it included SalesForce.com and Akamai as cloud providers. The general consensus seems to be, if you are a SaaS, PaaS, or a IaaS you are probably a cloud and this makes the list even longer.
Is Guitar Hero a Cloud?
So, today when I read that Merrill Lynch added Activision and Digital Reality to the cloud, it becomes clearer to me we may have met the “All’s Fair” saturation point. If you want to be a cloud just say you are a cloud. In fact if you are a vendor and you don’t figure out a way to call yourself a cloud you will probably be at a competitive disadvantage. In the late 1980′s there was a similar phenomenon with “Client Server”. Just when everything in IT was being called “client server” the term seemed mysteriously vanished from the IT lexicon.
Is World of Warcraft a Cloud?
Are MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds Clouds? Aren’t we basically saying that almost everything that provides a service is a cloud? Or is a cloud just all the IT infrastructure minus the hardware?
Topics: cloud computing | 10 Comments »
July 7th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Clouds are the new Web 2.0. Nice marketing shine on top of existing technology. Remember back when every company threw some ajax on their site and said “Ta da! We’re a web 2.0 company now!”? Same story, new buzz word.
On the positive side, the Web 2.0 concept did catch the mainstream’s eye and made them aware of the possibility of collaborative web services. Similarly, the “Cloud” concept is finally wrapping peoples’ minds around what is possible when you leverage web-scale infrastructure (application and physical) in an on-demand way. “Managed Services”, “ASP”, “Grid Computing”, “Software as a Service”, “Platform as a Service”, “Anything as a Service”… all terms that couldn’t get it done. Call it a “Cloud” and everyone goes bonkers. Go figure.
-Damon Edwards
http://dev2ops.org
http://controltier.com
July 7th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
[...] M. Willis wrote an interesting post on Merrill Lynch’s “Cloud War” note. He states that with companies like [...]
July 7th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
John,
thank you for your interesting blog post, I can understand your aversion to the random “cloud” labeling that has become popular. Nevertheless, I believe that WoW is a good example for a cloud (application). My reply:
http://markusklems.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/wow-is-a-cloud/
July 10th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
[...] John M. Willis asks if Guitar Hero is a cloud? As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the [...]
July 18th, 2008 at 1:16 am
[...] Damon Edwards [...]
July 18th, 2008 at 3:31 am
[...] Damon Edwards [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:30 pm
[...] Damon Edwards says: “Clouds are the new Web 2.0. Nice marketing shine on top of existing technology. Remember back when every company threw some ajax on their site and said “Ta da! We’re a web 2.0 company now!”? Same story, new buzz word.” [...]
November 7th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
[...] John M. Willis asks if Guitar Hero is a cloud? As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the [...]
July 11th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
[...] John M. Willis asks if Guitar Hero is a cloud? As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the [...]
April 16th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
[...] John M. Willis asks if Guitar Hero is a cloud? As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this “cloud” thing, myself included, it seems like the [...]